The present invention relates to electronic data processing in general, and more particularly to application programming.
Applications can be developed using various architectures, including, for example, a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. The MVC architecture breaks an application into three separate parts—models, views, and controllers. Each model can have multiple views, where each view displays information about the model to a user. A controller of the model receives events, for example, raised by a user interacting with a view to manipulate the model. Each model can have multiple controllers, and a controller can relate to multiple views. The models and the controllers typically include application code. When changes occur in a model, the model updates its views. Data binding can be used for data transport between the view and its model or controller. For example, where a table view is defined to display data from a corresponding table stored in the model or controller, the table can be bound to and thus used as the data source for the table view. The table view can be replaced by a further view, such as a graph view, that binds against the same table. In this case, the further view can display the table data without changing anything in the controller or the model.
Application development is often divided into two general stages: design time and runtime. The design time stage can include steps such as designing the views of an application (including the layout of the user interface elements in each view), modeling of the application flow (including the selection of the views to displayed), designing one or more models, and creating and editing other application elements, such as controllers and contexts. The design time stage can also include the binding of user interface (UI) elements within the views to data sources that are defined in a data type repository.
Regardless of which architecture is used, it is often desirable to structure an application (including, for example, the models, views, and controllers that make up an MVC application) into reusable entities or components.